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Friday, October 31, 2014

Dungeons and Dragons 2, the sequel no one wanted and some how managed to be better than the first film. Yes it is a straight to DVD release, yes it has large plot holes that they can double as a home for a family of four, yes it is kind of dumb, but better than the first movie.

The Captain of the Guard is back in this movie. In the opening credits he explains that he has been undead for a hundred years and is rather upset about that. Since he can't get revenge on the wizard that did this to him, he has set his sights on destroying the city he used to guard. Luckily for him there is a McGuffin that can help him with his quest. So the opening credits show his journey as he acquires the McGuffin.

Elsewhere in the city that has no idea it is about to be destroyed, Lord Protagonist is ignoring his staff while watching a sword fight. Lord Protagonist used to be captain of the guard and studied to become a CPA. After a distinguished career Lord Protagonist is too old to go on adventures and is put in charge of the tax department. Though at the moment he is more interested in practicing with swords than listening to his staff. So leaving his staff to sputter about tax crap, the Lord finds a sword and some armour and challenges the new captain of the city guard. The new captain was a student of the Lord and is also studying to get his double major in being an Ass.

The two of them duel and the new captain lets the Lord win. After ordering his troops to leave the movie until the third act, the Ass shows the Lord the tip of a feather he cut off of the Lord's helmet. Explaining that if this feather was his neck he would have been killed due to old age. That's right, your neck moves sixteen inches above your head as you reach your late forties. So the Lord consoles himself by visiting his sorceress wife. She is studying the McGuffin wizard school of magic.

Her attempts at learning McGuffin magic only result in her destroying a pair of gloves. Before she can bemoan the fact that she failed news arrives that there is trouble at the mountains. A couple of farmers went into the mountains and have not been seen again. Wanting to keep costs down Lord Protagonist and his wife volunteer to solve what happened to the farmers.

In the mountains they discover poison gas and a sleeping giant that is breathing out the poison gas. Not just any poison breathing dragon but a poison breathing dragon god that destroyed the McGuffin mages after they imprisoned it. Luckily for our heroes the McGuffin mages hid all their notes in the city library before they quit being mages and took up heavy drinking in a forest somewhere. So Lord Protagonist and his wife stay up all night studying notes that make no sense. Having no luck with that they resort to using magic to make sense of the notes.

This results in part of the library being destroyed, a fair sized chunk of the Sorceress' scalp being removed, and the plot advances in regards to the McGuffin magic.With the fate of the city on the line and the city guard unavailable until the third act there is only one thing to do, assemble a group of third party independent contractors. Lord Protagonist knows just the people that can be brought in to get the job done and because they all owe him a favour so the kingdom will not have to worry about paying them. We have a priest who hates people who wear shoes in holy places of worship, a barbarian warrior woman, a cynical and surly dwarf thief, and a elf teleportation specialist.

Together these five heroes will go forward to find the pool of plot acceleration. Back at the city, the Sorceress is dying due to the Captain of the Guard casting a increase drama spell on her. So in an attempt to make the McGuffin mage's notes readable she set them on fire and the notes become readable. Elsewhere, the fiscally responsible adventures stumble upon their first trap set by a lich (a wizard who's body has died by his mind and will keep going). The party escapes the trap but Lord Protagonist is starting to believe the Ass that he is too old for this kind of life.

The adventures get closer to the pool of plot acceleration and they fall into another trap that kills the priest. Back in the city, the sorceress is destroying stuff in the name of research and decaying more. Our heroes use the pool of plot acceleration and the elf teleport specialist gets to do her thing. Sadly she teleports them into a trap and gets her hand stuck in stone. However, the Captain of the Guard created an easy to escape trap and our heroes escape with the McGuffin and race towards the city and the third act.

The mages find the McGuffin mage's lair under the city, the Ass and the city guard return, and the dragon god wakes up. The Ass dies and there is much rejoicing by me. The movie ends with a happy and predictable conclusion.

For all the crap I have given this movie it really is not that bad. I have no problem recommending renting this movie or watching it on Netflix. It is a better popcorn fantasy movie than it has any right to be.

MVT: The director was able to mix practical effects with cgi effects to keep the viewer in the movie.Make or Break: What makes this movie for me is the plot's ability to capture the feel of being on an adventure created by someone who took a crapload of dice and made something entertaining up.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Marwella (Helen Hughes) has a small greenhouse which she tends with great
passion.Another of her (not-so-great) passions
is her handyman friend Fred (Sandy
Webster), and Marwella is delighted when he asks her to dinner.After Fred pricks his finger on a plant Marwella
had received from the Micronesia area but had been doing poorly of late, he collapses
and is rushed to the local hospital.A
large, larval worm emerges from his mouth, and suddenly a little prick is the
least of Fred’s troubles.

William Fruet’s Blue Monkey
(aka Insect! aka Invasion of the Bodysuckers) is yet another in the long, long line
of films I read about way back in the day in the pages of magazines like Fangoria (issue 69, in fact).And like a great many of those (another
would be Slaughterhouse, which I
reviewed on this very site some time ago), they slipped through the cracks of
time and eventually faded to little more than distant memories.But before that occurred, they became grand flights
of fancy as they played out in the theater of my mind. Never mind that, one, the theater of my mind
would never translate into a coherent film narrative, and two, there is a
reason why some things are best left unknown.Thus, this film looks good on paper, while it ultimately fails on
screen.This is not for lack of material,
mind you.In fact, part of the reason
that it fails is the sheer amount of material in it.By that same token, this same volume is what marks
Blue Monkey as a slight standout in
the Horror genre.Just for all the wrong
reasons.

If you were simply to read the above
synopsis, you would think this was a straight ahead monster flick (or maybe a
melodrama about two elderly people falling in love and failing in health).However, you have a subplot involving the
disease that sprang from the same plant as the insect.You have Jim (Steve Railsback), our hero cop, who is only in the hospital in the
first place because his partner Oscar (Peter
Van Wart) was shot in the stomach while on duty.You have the comedy stylings of SCTV alumni Joe Flaherty and Robin Duke
as the Bakers, who are expecting their first baby any second now.You have the tiresome exploits of the grating
child patients (one of whom is played by the soon-to-be-worth-a-damn Sarah Polley).You also have the notion that the hospital is
actually a remodeled insane asylum.But
for as intriguing as any one of these elements may be, they fail because they
never form a cohesive whole when they’re all put together.Each of these subplots seems to exist in
different films from this one, and they rarely intermingle with each other in
any meaningful way.This would be fine
and dandy if the disparate pieces were at least entertaining in their own
right, but they’re more missed opportunities as a whole rather than successful
fragments.

If filmmakers like David Cronenberg have taught us anything,
it is that our bodies hate us and are looking for the first available
opportunity to revolt and kill us.Diseases, viruses, what-have-yous are scary because they are faceless
(unless you’re an epidemiologist or the like).They are the brutality, the caprice, of nature incarnate in much the
same way as the animal/insect world.They cannot be reasoned with, or jailed, or chopped into pieces like a
flesh and blood enemy might be.They
embody the loss of control we see in a great many Horror films, and worse than
that, they do not discriminate (or in so much as they discriminate according to
the wishes of filmmakers/storytellers).You can employ whatever safeguards you like, but if a disease wants to
get you, it will get you.And even if
you choose not to believe in the all-pervasive nature of diseases, this is how
they are perceived by a vast number of people.Ergo, they are excellent fodder for genre films.You might find it risible that Jason Voorhees
could be hiding under your bed, waiting to stab you with his index finger, but
a disease could already be inside your body, waiting to burst forth, and that’s
suddenly not so ludicrous anymore.Either way, you stand a good chance of seeing your innards on the
outside (at least from a cinematic standpoint).The only difference is whether they’re taken from the outside in or the
inside out.

Naturally, one would think that
people should feel safe in hospitals (and especially if one is afraid of dying
from disease in the first place).Yet
the vast majority of non-medical personnel don’t take a great deal of solace in
these institutions, and this is a significant reason why hospitals are
excellent locations for Horror stories.These
are places where people are literally paid to stab, cut, and drill the bodies
of their customers.Even if the
practitioners aren’t malevolent like we imagine, relishing the torment they
bestow on us, there is always the possibility that they are incompetent (and
no, that’s not a statement or accusation on my behalf; merely an observation on
the general perception/misperception by the average person).What if you receive the wrong medicine?What if they amputate the wrong limb?What if they leave an instrument inside your body?The point is people die in hospitals every
day.You may survive your surgery, but
there’s no way to tell if there won’t be complications afterward, from
infections, to organ rejections, to just sudden fits of death.Every patient in a hospital is vulnerable,
and there are more than enough dark corridors and eerily silent rooms to creep
out the most stalwart among us.

Because the threats in Blue Monkey are so impersonal, one would
think that it would help greatly if the characters weren’t.Sadly, they are all stereotypes of the
flattest variety.Dr. Carson (Gwynyth Walsh) is the classic, capable
female doctor who instantly turns into a Screaming Mimi when faced with things
outside her range (read: giant insects).Marwella and her blind pal Dede (Joy
Coghill) are the matter-of-fact, elderly folks who just happen to know more
than they think they do.Jim is the
classic hardassed cop who grinds his teeth and flips out at the smallest piece
of bad news (being played by Railsback
doesn’t really help in this regard).The
children all act like little adults in that
oh-look-how-cute-they-are-but-not-really way that simply makes them annoying rather
than charming.Even John Vernon gets to briefly strut his bureaucratic jerkoff routine
for the camera.Nevertheless, not one of
these people manages to be engaging, so following them around on their little
misadventures is nothing less than heavy lifting for the viewer.This is one of those films I think it’s
better to read about than experience, and that’s pretty sad.

MVT:Once again, I have to
give the award to the practical effects.They’re cool to look at when they show up.That said, they’re shot in such an
insignificant fashion (quick cuts, low lighting, strobe lighting, shaky
handheld) that you never get to fully appreciate the work that went into them.

Make or Break:The first
scene with the kiddy characters was like a prelude to the kiss of death the
filmmakers would deliver just a short way down the road.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The number fifty-two seems to pop
up in a lot of things (like seven and thirteen).There are fifty-two weeks in a year.There are fifty-two playing cards (less the
jokers) in a standard deck (and also part of the name of one of the more
frustrating games that can be played with them – Fifty-Two Pickup).Okay,
maybe there aren’t all that many significant instances of fifty-two in our
world, but it stands out for me (and I’m sure almost every other comic book
fan) for one reason: Fifty-two is the number of Earths in the DC Comics universe (for the time
being).What this means is that there
are multiple variations of all of DC’s
characters in some form or another, and the concept as a whole is referred to
as a multiverse.My understanding is
that this idea was developed in the Sixties as a way to integrate characters
from the beginnings of superhero-dom with their modern
counterparts/reimaginings as well as further distinguishing themselves from
each other.Of course, the whole thing
became a morass of continuity where the history of some characters (Hawkman, I’m looking at you) became so
convoluted, a casual reader couldn’t tell if they were coming or going (a lot
like X-Men continuity, especially in
the Eighties and Nineties, though they and their publisher are a discussion for
some other time).

The DC multiverse was condensed into one unified universe in the epic Crisis On Infinite Earths, and for a
long time this was the status quo at DC.The occasional “off-model” permutation of a
character would be explored here or there in single issues and/or miniseries
under the Elseworlds banner.About three or so years ago, however, the
muckety mucks at DC decided to bring
back the multiverse, and so they relaunched all of their titles under the
heading of the New 52.For a great many readers (myself included)
their books quickly fell into confusion again, with some characters continuing
exactly as they left off, some starting over entirely new, and some kind of in
the middle.They managed to do in a
vastly condensed period what it took their predecessors decades to do (i.e.
muddy the waters), and while there are a few books worth reading, I personally prefer
Marvel out of the Big Two.So what has any of this got to do with Paul Hunt and Lamar Card’s The Clones?Well, as you may have already guessed, part
of the film’s plot has to do with the aforementioned “untouchable number.”I hesitate to state the connection outright,
though all things considered, telling you every last inch of this film’s plot
really wouldn’t hurt a thing in the long run.

Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene) narrowly escapes from
his laboratory after an accident is manufactured by unseen forces.Coming back around the front of the facility,
he spies someone stealing his car.Giving chase, Gerry discovers that someone who looks just like him has
quickly and easily installed himself in the doctor’s life.Things get more complicated when CID agents
Nemo (Gregory Sierra) and Tom Sawyer
(Otis Young) are called in to “get”
the real Appleby.

You’d think with a synopsis like
that, the film’s story would be loaded with contrivances and twists, especially
considering the narration at the beginning warning the viewer about the
likelihood of human cloning within the next ten to twenty-five years.The ground work is laid out for a stimulating
movie, either physically or mentally.Nonetheless, there is little to no consideration of the ethics or moral
implications of the process.There is
little to no consideration for the struggle Gerry needs to go through to try
and get his life back.There is little
to no consideration that he had much of a life to begin with outside of some
idyllic boating shots with his wife Penny (Susan
Hunt).In fact, Gerry, as a
character, is by and large a cipher.We
know next to nothing about him other than he is a scientist and he is
married.We learn nothing about him
throughout the course of the film.He
could just as easily be a member of the audience watching the film, and that,
to my mind, is what the film gets right.By making the main character as inoffensively bland and blank as
possible and thrusting him through a series of chase scenes (which consume the
vast majority of the film’s run time), the audience is given the opportunity to
put itself in Gerry’s place as they root for this man who has been unjustly
persecuted for no other reason than that he is now an encumbrance.In effect, the audience becomes a double for
Gerry.

Like so many Paranoia/Conspiracy
films of this time, the focus is on the plight of one man against a nefarious
agency or agencies with fiendish machinations afoot right under the noses of
the population at large.Of course, this
is emphasized in Gerry’s dealings with everyone he comes into contact with from
his boss to his wife and damn near all other characters in between.Not only are these characters not to be
trusted, but it is made plain quite swiftly that this is so.A further clue/touch is added by having one
of the main villains (Stanley Adams)
speak with a German accent (I’m unsure if he had one naturally, but if he did,
he didn’t try to cover it up here, and it’s a plus either way).Stylistically, the paranoia angle is
reinforced via Dutch angled compositions, slow motion usage, fisheye POV shots,
smash cut editing, and the use (or non-use) of diegetic sound in the action
scenes.It is in this way that The Clones turns in on itself as these
films tend to do.Visuals of this sort
are so removed from the reality the audience knows, there is little to no sense
that can be derived, even in more traditional scenes (take the sequence of the
hippies speaking gibberish to Gerry, if you doubt me).By subverting the audience’s inclination to
make sense of what it sees, it forces multiple readings into existence (like,
say, fifty-two Earths in a multiverse).The whole film may be taken as a Conspiracy film with psychedelic
imagery.It may be taken as a
Psychedelic film with conspiratorial leanings.It may be taken as a quasi-incompetent (or quasi-successful, depending
on your perspective) piece of experimental filmmaking.It may be taken as Gerry’s descent into
madness.It may be taken as the seams of
Gerry’s domestic life being pulled apart.For as
much as the film claims that it’s about cloning, that’s only a tangential piece
of the pie.I think the film is a bit
more insidious than that.You can think
about it for hours and come up with a plethora of ideas, or you can think about
it for five minutes and write it all off.Honestly, I think of it both ways at different times, and I’m fine with
that.Or maybe I only think of it one
way, and the clone of me who just stole my car thinks of it the other way.

MVT:The main idea of the
film is intriguing.I’m kind of
surprised we don’t see very many films with this premise these days (I know of
one or two in the past year or so, but outside of some very basic information,
I know nothing about them), as I think it’s a treasure trove waiting to be
mined.

Make Or Break:The finale is
great, and there is a fantastic accentuation of dead bodies as bags of meat
which is both striking and blackly comic in this environ.

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